The corner of your eye

The myriad moments of Brighton and Hove

By Ian Grant

A collection of shoes hanging from a telephone wire at the end of Kensington Street. What's that all about, then?

Under the bridge on Trafalgar Street, a fly-posted soap opera begins....

Wandering around, Brighton has a lovely habit of nudging you out of whatever routine you've fallen into, a gentle tickle to wake you from your daydreams. There are far too many strange people in Brighton for the streets to be entirely normal, the whole place is full of weird little distractions, coincidences, and after-thoughts. Shops that appear to sell nothing except inflatable monkeys, stencilled statements on walls that momentarily catch your eye and demand some kind of response, people dressed as Queen Victoria for no apparent reason, that kind of thing.

Those are moments to treasure.  They lift you out of the everyday, beyond the humdrum, if only for a few vital seconds.  Walking up Trafalgar Street to the station, someone's fly-posted pleas for reconcilation to an ex-girlfriend; one rather hopes that she'll respond in kind, to keep us all in the loop.  Why there, though?  Hardly the most romantic place in town, unless you like being serenaded by pigeons.  At the end of Kensington Street, a growing collection of shoes hangs from a telephone wire, an open-air, free-for-all art project that appears to be gathering its own momentum.

Walking under the railway line on New England Road a few weeks ago, I noticed a box perched on one of the ledges.  It's there for a reason. A curious reason, certainly, but there's nothing in the rules to say that reasons can't be curious. Written on the box in marker pen, with accompanying smiley face: "PLEASE PUT ANYTHING FROM THE BOTTOM OF YOUR BAG OR IN YOUR POCKET INTO THE LETTERBOX". And sure enough, a convenient letterbox has been cut into the front for the purpose described. Unable to offer the box anything except money and my house keys, I resolve to return later with something in the spirit of the experiment. I never get around to doing so, of course; normal service takes over and there's too much to do.

But that's the point: you carry on your way, but your life is slightly different from before.  Your spirits are raised, in a small but nonetheless significant way, by an encounter with such nonsense.  Life is better for such things...and Brighton always has something new up its sleeve, ready to appear in the corner of your eye.